It’s always exciting to hear about fresh grants as they are allocated, but what occurs subsequent to the announcement? In this series, we will explore a few projects that are either in progress or already completed. Continue reading to discover recent milestones and accomplishments by grantees!
InterRep
For an individual transitioning to a new social media application, one of the primary points of challenge is reconstructing their reputation. InterRep seeks to alleviate this issue by enabling a user to associate a social media profile with an Ethereum address, which can be utilized to verify their identity on a new platform.
Grantees Jay Graber and Raphael Roullet have developed the UI and smart contracts for an InterRep MVP (you will need to connect with MetaMask on Ropsten to engage with the UI). The first version, deployed to Ropsten on June 30, permits the verification of a Twitter account via an API and privately connects it to an Ethereum address. An NFT “badge” is minted to the linked address which serves as proof of ownership of the associated reputation. Refer to the launch post for further insights into how InterRep functions, its applications, and upcoming plans.
Statebox, Philipp Zahn and Jules Hedges for Compositional Game Engine
Game theory, which examines strategic interactions among rational participants, lies at the core of mechanism design for decentralized frameworks. Nevertheless, the “games” present in real-world interactions such as blockchain validation or voting within a DAO are profoundly intricate and challenging to analyze.
Introducing Compositional Game Theory, which views large, complex games as assemblages of smaller, simpler games. The equilibrium (i.e., an outcome where a specific player has no motivation to alter their strategy as long as all other players’ strategies remain unchanged) of a complicated game can be characterized based on its simpler components.
While these ideas are extremely pertinent to Ethereum, the foundational theory is quite complex. Philipp Zahn and Jules Hedges intend to enhance the accessibility of the theory by creating a software engine for both modeling and assessing strategic interactions through modular programming. The recent release post presents more information regarding the system, which employs a small domain-specific language along with Haskell for defining functions, and illustrates the process using an auction format as an example.
This introduction is merely the commencement – the project is in its initial phases and will continue to progress and introduce new features. Follow @Statebox for updates, and visit the project’s Github to stay informed about developments or to contribute.
Blogs blogs blogs!
The Ethereum Foundation privacy and scaling team has initiated a blog where they will share their findings and developments, frequently collaborating closely with grantees, along with guest contributions from the grantees themselves.
The first guest contribution, An Introduction to Optimism’s Optimistic Rollup, was authored by Kyle Charbonnet, who received a grant to evaluate the security characteristics of Optimism’s optimistic rollup framework. This was not an audit, but a chance to gain a deeper understanding of a structure expected to be heavily utilized and replicated. The conclusions of the evaluation will be released soon; in the meantime, Kyle’s post provides an overview of the protocol to provide context!
A few other recent entries from grantees:
- Scotty Poi, SSZ Visualizer Online: an introduction to the new visualization platform at ssz.dev.
- Blagoj, Rollup Diff Compression: tl;dr on inquiries into minimizing the L1 data footprint of a rollup for the specific context of airdrops.
- Dark Forest, v0.6 Round 2 Wrapup: outcomes, resources, emerging strategic and economic models, notable contributions, and more from the latest round.
- Geoff Lamperd, Trusted Setup UI Update: enhancements to the UI for a general trusted setup infrastructure.
Are you developing something you believe could positively impact Ethereum? Visit our grants page to learn more about the criteria we consider in the projects we support.
